Directors
Interviews - Directors
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DIY Photogrammetry: Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner on Constant
One of the highlights of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s 40-minute not-quite-documentary Constant considers how the meter was standardized. It’s a topic that sounds drawn from one of the numerous popular history bestsellers of the last few decades explaining how some obscure topic is actually the key to understanding how the modern world came to be—and, indeed, one of the three source texts Constant credits is Ken Adler’s The Measure of All Things, which tells the story of the codification of the metric system. That story, however, is wild, involving in part a seven-year, on-foot journey undertaken by […]
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“King Crimson Being a Way of Doing Things as Opposed to a Set Organism”: Director Toby Amies on His SXSW Doc, In the Court of the Crimson King
When Toby Amies emails me the Vimeo press link to his SXSW-premiering documentary on the band King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King, he appends a list of influences. There’s a documentarian (Ross McElwee), a pseudo-documentarian (Christopher Guest), a narrative filmmaker who is a real King Crimson fan (Vincent Gallo) and then a couple of directors whose impact remained a bit puzzling both before and after seeing the film: Ernst Lubitsch and Sam Peckinpah. But perhaps the cinephile (and King Crimson fan) in me was looking too closely, because after watching In the Court of the Crimson King […]
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Ambition in Filmmaking, Mia Goth’s Dual Role and His Sirkian A24 Prequel: Ti West on His SXSW-Premiering X
After 2016’s Western, In the Valley of Violence, and several years directing episodic TV, Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Inkeepers, The Sacrament) makes a very welcome return to the world of feature horror with X, a ’70s-set picture in which the sort of ambition that has characterized West’s impressive filmography is both evident on screen as well as the subtext driving the film’s characters. The set-up: a ragtag group of filmmakers ensconce themselves in a rented barn outside a foreboding farmhouse straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to make a porno feature, The Farmer’s Daughter. Mia […]
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Five Questions for Drea Cooper and Zachary Canepari About Their SXSW-Premiering Documentary, Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets
As more and more human activity — personal, social, economic, political — happens online, a challenge is posed to practitioners of that legacy art form, the feature film. To wit: how to tell an 80-minute-plus story whose symbolic meanings were created in part by interactions and juxtapositions occurring in virtual spaces, a story that’s possibly inseparable from a rich visual culture that is most accurately parsed in portrait mode and not in a theater or on a flat screen? Providing one answer are filmmakers Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari, whose latest feature documentary, the SXSW-premiering Diamond Hands: The Legend of […]
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Shooting Under Fire: Filmmaking in Conflict Zones with Brent and Craig Renaud
Filmmaker Brent Renaud, who, with his brother Craig, made films in conflict zones around the world, was killed while filming in Ukraine today. He was also co-founder of the Arkansas Motion Picture Institute and executive and artistic director of the Little Rock Film Festival. Here — originally published December 17, 2013 — is our profile of the two brothers and their extraordinary filmmaking practice. R.I.P. Brent Renaud. — Editor From NYC drug addicts to Mexican drug cartels, from today’s soldiers to yesterday’s civil rights pioneers, from Chicago gang members to Afghan warlords, Craig and Brent Renaud have made a career […]
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Five Questions for Casey Neistat about His SXSW-Premiering David Dobrik Documentary, Under the Influence
When Casey Neistat, along with his brother Van, made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2006, he had already made over 300 shorts that had played at film festivals, museums and online. Three years later he launched an HBO series. But Google Neistat now and the information panel for the 40-year filmmaker offers a single blunt ID: “American YouTuber.” It was only in 2010 that Neistat began posting his work on YouTube and in 2015 that these postings became daily, a profusion of content (and subscribers — 12 million) that have made him a progenitor of a newer generation of […]
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“It’s About the Emotion, the Performance, the Rhythm and the Space in Between the Words”: Rosa Ruth Boesten on Her SXSW-Debuting doc Master of Light
A stunning work of cinematic nonfiction, Rosa Ruth Boesten’s Master of Light follows the classical painter George Anthony Morton, a fan of Rembrandt who conjures exquisite portraits of his own family members in the style of the Old Masters. Never formally trained, Morton nonetheless managed to land a spot at the New York branch of The Florence Academy of Art, eventually going on to study in Europe and win awards abroad. Which would be a remarkable feat for any American, let alone a Black man from Kansas City who spent a decade behind bars for dealing drugs. But likewise remarkable […]
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Building a Microbudget Ghost Story Around an AirBnB Location: Director Pete Ohs and Cast on the SXSW-Premiering Jethica
Two women, each fleeing unspecified trauma, holed up in an aluminum-sided mobile home in the middle of a desolate patch of New Mexico flatlands is an apt set-up for a microbudget horror film, but the pleasures and originality of Pete Ohs SXSW-premiering Jethica are in the ways in which it avoids all the more obvious narrative pathways it might have taken. (Indeed, it’s an exemplar of George Saunders’s dictum of “ritual banality avoidance” — rejecting the “crappo version” of a story.) There are no screams or shaky-cam chases, no woman-in-jeopardy jump scares. Instead, Ohs has worked with his actors to […]
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“There Were No Easy Answers to My Questions”: Iliana Sosa on Her SXSW-Debuting Doc What We Leave Behind
Iliana Sosa’s What We Leave Behind is an astonishingly intimate labor of love. The film emerged from Sosa’s desire to document her grandfather Julián, a proudly hardworking man who first left his native Mexico back in the early 1940s to join the US government’s Bracero program, which brought in farm workers to remedy the WWII labor shortage. After his daughters, including the filmmaker’s mom, moved permanently to the States, the widowed Julián spent the next two decades traveling solo from Durango to visit them in the southwest. But as he now nears his nonagenarian years the monthly bus trip becomes […]
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Rediscovering the NBA’s First Female Player: Ben Proudfoot on The Queen of Basketball
More than just the answer to an obscure trivia question, Delta State University’s Lusia “Lucy” Harris was one of the most dominant basketball players of her era, eventually becoming the first woman drafted into the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1977. Her collegiate and amateur accomplishments were numerous, including three national championships and a 51-game winning streak while being the only woman of color on the Delta State Lady Statesmen women’s basketball team. (Her home games were played in an arena that, to this day, remains named after Walter Sillers, Jr., a prominent white nationalist.) Director Ben Proudfoot’s documentary short A Concerto […]
